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Sonatype Donates Apache Maven 3.x Integration to Hudson Project

Published: May 10, 2011 08:00

Sonatype, the company that is transforming software development, today announced that it will open source both its Maven 3.x and Eclipse integration for Hudson, the industry-leading open source Continuous Integration (CI) server and contribute the source code to the Hudson project. This news comes on the heels of Oracle’s announcement last week that it intends to move the Hudson Project to the Eclipse Foundation to improve the project’s insight, predictability and openness.

CI has taken hold as a key foundation for agile software development. In a recent survey sponsored by Sonatype and Oracle of more than 1,600 Java developers, 80 percent of all respondents have adopted CI and 75 percent of these CI users are using or have experimented with Hudson. The survey also found that the vast majority of respondents cite stability and performance of Hudson 2.0 to be the most critical features for adoption, with 49 percent listing improved Maven integration with Hudson as "very important" to their development plans. Maven integration is the second most popular plug-in for Hudson, according to an anonymous usage report which captured the number of unique installations of each publically available plug-in from December 2008 through July 2010.

Sonatype, in concert with Oracle, has made considerable architectural improvements to Hudson in an effort to improve performance and provide a platform for further innovation by the user community. Core infrastructure changes, including JSR330 and REST support were added to improve reliability and performance; provide a standard framework to ease plug-in development; and to offer the best Maven integration possible to the global community of Hudson users.

Concurrent with Oracle’s proposal to make Hudson an Eclipse Foundation project, Sonatype has elected to contribute all of the Maven 3.x integration work it has created to date as a sign of support for the advancement of Hudson and to attract more enterprise-class contributors. Sonatype fully supports Hudson as an Eclipse project, where it can thrive under a diverse, community-led environment with the necessary Intellectual Property (IP) processes and rules needed to ensure a mature, stable product for the enterprise.

"Our excitement over Hudson’s move to Eclipse, and what this means for the future of the project, prompted Sonatype to donate some of its most valuable commercial features to the open source project," said Jason van Zyl, Founder and CTO of Sonatype. "We’ve invested significant time and resources into these features and believe that by giving them back to the community we will help make the project even stronger. The Eclipse foundation is a great home for Hudson and we hope this move will provide an opportunity to reunite the Hudson community and that the project will continue to grow and prosper under the Foundation’s oversight and governance."

As a Strategic Member at Eclipse and key Hudson contributor, Sonatype will provide full-time development resources to the project in addition to the support and value-added functionality found in its future commercial offerings.